Why you should check your Wordpress contact form

You’ve built yourself a beautiful website, optimised it to drive traffic and embedded a WordPress contact form.

Now you can sit back and watch the enquiries roll in, right? Not quite.

So often business owners set themselves up with spanking websites and then go off to, well, run their businesses and forget about them.

For a short amount of time, that’s fine, but if you leave your website unattended for too long things can start to go wrong.

For instance, if plugins aren’t updated you may lose functionality within some parts of your website, images may end up looking distorted or your site may stop working on mobile.

What happens if my contact form breaks?

Here’s a real-life example of an issue we discovered with a client’s WordPress contact form.

We were asked to refresh a website to bring it up to date and generate more enquiries – a simple enough job.

However, when we started looking at the backend of the client’s website, we were pretty horrified by what we found.

There were no less than 700 unopened enquiries sat waiting to be responded to, followed by a further 345 submissions which had come via their contact form.

Due to a broken link between the website and the client, none of these 1,000+ messages had ever reached them.

This is a pretty extreme case, but it’s not the first time we’ve seen something like this happen, proving the importance of not just setting up your contact forms correctly, but checking them on a regular basis too.

Making sure your contact form works

One simple way of checking your contact form is to test it yourself.

Hop onto your website and submit a test enquiry. If it lands in your inbox as you’d expect, then great, everything’s working as it should.

If not, you need to investigate.

And don’t forget, if you’ve embedded multiple contact forms all over your site, we’d suggest checking those too.

A broken form could be something as simple as a typo in the submissions notification email address or it could be something more complicated such as a coding issue.

Some WordPress plugins will save enquiries so all may not be lost; however, if you aren’t checking your contact form regularly it could be months before people are responded to, meaning you’ve lost their attention. Also free plugins won’t save your enquiries.

While we’re mentioning saved enquiries, we should point out that this needs to be included in your privacy policy in order to comply with GDPR given that you will be storing people’s email addresses and potentially other personal information.